BBC battles with the bloggers

The BBC's Nick Reynolds, currently working on a new blog at the Future Media department, has a valiant account of his traumas on the Biased BBC blog, as published recently in the BBC's internal magazine Ariel.

Biased BBC exists to highlight just such incidents, but has had little ammunition, claims Reynolds. His attempts to wade into the site's conversations about various BBC stories have had a mixed response: one user commented that it is good he is prepared to get stuck in, but another dismissed his contribution as a crock of shit. As we know, blog commenters - particularly those who remain anonymous - are usually the most aggressive.

On the other hand, another contributor to Biased BBC is a BBC colleague, but uses the pseudonym John Reith.

"I'm still trying to work out who he is. He's an ambassador for the BBC, a real champion. Yet he must feel that if he uses his real name he will get in trouble. It's a terrible indictment of the BBC's culture that someone supporting the organisation so well can't use their real name.

Other colleagues have struggled to understand why Reynolds is prepared to spend so much effort trying to engage such a difficult audience, but that can only be applauded.

"I wouldn't recommend anyone to comment on Biased BBC if you don't have a thick skin. Things can get rough. Biased BBC recently celebrated its fifth birthday, and as it matures, it may becoming more controlled and blander, more like those newspapers with a predictable knee jerk anti BBC agenda. But there's a lot to be learned from its rise, and perhaps its fall. They want to talk to us. Why don't we talk to them?'"